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doctrine

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈdɒk.tɹɪn//
  • United States//ˈdɑk.tɹɪn//
  • Australia//ˈdɔk.tɹɪn//
  • New Zealand//ˈdɒk.tɹən//
  • New Zealand/[ˈdɔ̟k.tɹən]/

A belief or tenet, especially about philosophical or theological matters.

noun

  1. 1

    A belief or tenet, especially about philosophical or theological matters.

    The Incarnation is a basic doctrine of Christianity.

    The Four Noble Truths summarise the main doctrines of Buddhism.

    Metaphysics stagnates in scienceless (or uncritical) cultures; it is progressive in scientific ones. It progresses then because existing metaphysical doctrines are felt to be constricting frameworks, and thus unsatisfactory.

  2. 2

    The body of teachings of an ideology, most often a religion, or of an ideological or religious leader, organization, group, or text.

    What is the understanding of marriage and family in orthodox Marxist doctrine?

    This one thing do we (compelled by your blaſphemous accuſations) repeat oftener then we would: to the end that indifferent men may ſee what doctrine it is, which you ſo maliciouſly impugne.

  3. 3

    A self-imposed policy governing some aspect of a country's foreign relations, especially regarding what sort of behavior it will or will not tolerate from other countries.

    the Monroe Doctrine the Brezhnev Doctrine the Negroponte Doctrine

Etymology

From Middle English, from Old French, from Latin doctrina (“teaching, instruction, learning, knowledge”), from doctor (“a teacher”), from docere (“to teach”); see doctor.

Forms

plural
doctrines
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).